


The Little Things

by catstrophysics



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester Misses Castiel, Light Angst, M/M, Memories, One Shot, Pining, This got a lot more depressing than I originally planned..., everyone really needs a hug, oh well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-26 02:29:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20036401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catstrophysics/pseuds/catstrophysics
Summary: Castiel's been gone three months from the bunker, and Dean misses him like hell.





	The Little Things

It was the little things that finally drove him over the edge. 

He saw a girl walking down the street, just a few weeks after Castiel left, wearing a long tan coat. It wasn’t the same cut, even, fell differently about her shoulders and the length was all wrong, but the icy pang in his heart was all too familiar. She had chestnut brown hair cut short, curled around her ears, and it looked just like his, but more put together. Some thought went into it, with her, rather than his hair, always windswept, off-kilter from tired hands carding through, always the last thing to be fixed. He never saw her eyes, but if they had been electric blue, like the sky on a summer’s day with no rainclouds in sight, his heart may have simply given out. She turned the corner, disappearing behind the industrial brown-brick apartment building that had been on that block in Lebanon for as long as he could remember. Something about watching a tan coat leave broke his heart. 

That night Sam had left a stack of books on his bed, “for research,” he had claimed in the way he always did when Castiel was involved. The books had been expressly on angels. Each chapter had a pair of wings inked above the chapter title, a veritable rainbow of them, and Dean had paused for far too long on the page with raven-black wings, running trembling fingers over the sharp lines marking the edge of each feather. If a tear slipped from his eye and hit the page, he never noticed, because the memory of thunderclap wings thrown into sharp relief on a barn’s wall was all too clear. The book was tossed to the floor half-read, leather cover hitting the concrete floor with a _smack_ that echoed around Dean’s impractically-sized room. 

The cracks in the ceiling were his home, now, with how long he’d stared at them. The one that cut diagonally from the corner almost to the light fixture always caught his attention first, long and commanding, splitting out in fractals and lightning bolts of crumbling plaster. They watched over him, now, because his guardian angel was missing. Sleeping had never been as hard as the nights when he couldn’t feel blue eyes on him, couldn’t feel Castiel sitting in the chair in the corner where he had been every night since they first slept in the bunker. The cracks took the graveyard shift in his place, keeping sentinel in the dark. 

It was the mornings without the angel sitting across from him at the map table, hands wrapped around a mug of hot coffee that he drank even though he didn’t need caffeine in his veins, didn’t need the energy like Dean did. Now, Sam took that place, draining cup after cup and eyes still just as heavy, glances still just as furtive when he caught Dean staring at the wall behind him. He’d taken to doing that every morning, phantoms of the angel still drifting through the bunker despite his months of absence. Apparently, a lifetime of burning ghosts wasn’t enough to burn away his own memories. 

It had been three months since he’d last seen Castiel. The angel had fallen off the face of the Earth entirely, not even the faintest ping on their radar since he’d said goodbye, said he _needed some time_. Three months, during which he hadn’t listened to a single Led Zeppelin track. Except for once, the night after, and the ringing chords of “Ramble On” too happy, too much sunshine and golden-hued highways for his shattered heart to process. He’d slammed the pause button on the stereo before the track could reach the chorus and slept for sixteen turbulent hours. 

“Missing” might not be the right word. Castiel was still very much around in Dean’s mind. He was _longing_ for him, and the pain of it cut him like a dagger to the bone every day. 

So one could imagine his surprise when the angel turns up leaning on his car one day. 

Braced with his elbows back on the hood, Castiel was in a position of forced nonchalance. The muscles in his shoulders strained with the effort of remaining upright, wound like clock springs under his skin. Hopeful eyes turned towards Dean’s face, still some distance away across the garage, and he moved as if to speak, but decided against it. 

He looked world-weary, coat hanging loose off his tired frame like skin off an underfed cow, and one had the sense his ribs would be visible if he stripped off his shirt. His tie was off and balled up in one hand, the blue silk faded and stained and hardly recognizable as the crisp uniform once mandated by Heaven. 

The angel looked defeated. The posture of a warrior, once his defining quality as he headed a battalion in Heaven, was burdened with the world mounted on his back. _His_ world, that is to say the Winchesters, and how much he thought he’d let them down by running off. If regret were a tangible, visible aspect of a personality, then Castiel wore a cloak of it, embroidered with exhaustion and fringed with prayers for the brothers to just take him back. 

His hands were covered in black streaks, oil or dust or mud caked under his fingernails and it was clear to Dean’s eyes he hadn’t bothered to take care of himself while he was gone. His hair was in the worst shape in recent memory, patches sticking straight up in the back from nights of sleeping on it and never once attacking it back into proper form with a brush. 

His eyes were heartbreaking. The plea in them, weighted with sorrow and sodden with regret, shot an arrow straight through Dean’s heart. The blue was muted, glazed over with aches that his celestial body never should have had to experience. Three months, one hundred thirty days, and every single hour was etched into the deep lines cutting across his face. His smile lines, so clear in years past from wide grins and joke-induced laughter, had sagged with underuse. 

Nevertheless, he smiled, half of his mouth quirking up as if the effort were still simply too much, as if half a smile were easier to manage when met with Dean’s inevitable rage and disappointment, because half a smile was quicker to lower from its mast than a full one. His eyes attempted a twinkle, but the flint and steel used to light such a twinkle had long been missing, snatched away the day he walked from the bunker’s reinforced door. He chose to simply hold Dean’s astonished gaze. 

“Hello, Dean,” he tried, voice cracking an octave down from disuse. The words scraped against his throat, fighting their way out, and he winced. Still, blue eyes held green, and the garage full of vintage cars heaved a breath. 

“Heya, Cas,” Dean choked out, words half-formed as they tumbled from his lips, and he started forward, stepping over the wrenches he’d left on the floor earlier that day. 

Arms out. Castiel looked genuinely surprised when Dean raised his arms a few steps away, and the soft gasp he let out when Dean embraced him was entirely involuntary. 

Castiel smelled like cold metal and cigarette smoke, the trademarks of having stayed in a city for too long, and Dean breathed in the scent off of his coat. He almost missed Castiel putting his arms around him, and would have entirely had he not run his hands up his back in one swipe, fingers digging into his shoulders at long last. 

They stood together, intertwined, making up for months of no calls and mental letters and bitten-out curses and fretful prayers in one embrace. 

“I missed you,” Castiel whispered, and Dean hummed in agreement. 

It was the little things about living in the same space they both grew to miss in three months, and it was the little things in the hug that brought them back together. 

Dean didn’t take his arm from around Castiel walking back into the bunker. Sam’s rage, he decided, was easier faced together. 

And if, that night, Dean had pulled Castiel’s chair a little closer, then there was nothing anyone could do to stop him from doing it, night after night, until the angel was sitting next to the bed. 

The little things made life worth living, to Team Free Will, and when “Traveling Riverside Blues” came on and Dean didn’t flip the radio off, well, Sam counted that as a win. And the angel in the backseat grinned wide and listened to Dean sing.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a hot minute since I've written any Destiel, and that felt incredibly wrong. I hope you enjoyed! Kudos and comments are absolutely fantastic, pLEASE leave me feedback/what you liked/what you didn't like/song recommendations. This was written in one sitting and entirely un-proofread, so my apologies for any errors.


End file.
